Shakespeare's Shortest Play Which play is Shakespeare's shortest? The average length of a play in Elizabethan England was 3000 lines. With 1,787 lines and 14,369 words, The Comedy of Errors is the shortest Shakespearean play (based on the first edition of The Riverside Shakespeare, 1974). How to cite this article: Mabillard, Amanda. Shakespeare's Shortest Play. Shakespeare Online. 20 Sept. 2004. (date when you accessed the information) < >. ______ Shakespeare FAQ | Folger Shakespeare Library FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY 201 East Capitol Street, SE Washington, DC 20003 Open to the public every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas. January 24 – March 5, 2017 Stage Director Talk: As You Like It January 26, 2017 at 6:30 PM The Folger's online catalog is your first stop for finding items in our rich rare and modern materials collections. The Folger is looking for exceptionally qualified individuals who are committed to the mission, vision, and values of our organization.

You are here Shakespeare Shakespeare FAQ The following Frequently Asked Questions about Shakespeare's life and works are based on the many questions the Folger receives from the public. 1896 print of Shakespeare's birthplace by Stas Waley & Co. Item Title: ART File S899h1 no.56 (size M) Luna Link: Shakespeare’s life and family When and where was Shakespeare born? Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in 1564. The exact date of his birth isn't known, but it is generally celebrated on April 23. We do know that he was baptized on April 26, and it was common practice at the time to have an infant be baptized no later than the first Sunday after birth. What was Shakespeare's education? He likely attended the local grammar school, beginning at age 7, although he probably had learned his letters and basic reading before then. There is no record of him attending university. Who were Shakespeare's parents and siblings? Shakespeare's parents were John and Mary (neé Arden), who were married in about 1557. William was the oldest surviving child; two infant daughters died before William was born.

William's younger siblings were Gilbert (born in 1566), Joan (1569), Anne (1571), Richard (1574) and Edmund (1580). Ann died at the age of eight, but the others lived into their adulthoods. Who was Shakespeare's wife? Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway near the end of 1582, when he was 18 years old. The exact date of Anne's birth is unknown, but she is thought to have been around 26 when they married. Why did Shakespeare leave his wife his "second best bed"? William Shakespeare wrote in his last will and testament, dated March 25, 1616, "Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed with the furniture" (furniture is used to refer to the curtains and bedcover which formed part of the complete bed). This was not an unusual bequest, nor was it likely to have been intended as a snub. The best bed was usually regarded as an heirloom piece, to be passed to the heir rather than the spouse.

It is also probable that the best bed would have been reserved for guests, meaning the "second best" was the bed that William and Anne shared. What did Shakespeare’s son die of? We don't really know how Shakespeare's young son Hamnet died. He had a twin sister named Judith, who lived to adulthood and married, but Hamnet died at the age of 11 and a half. Child mortality was high in the sixteenth century; there were no antibiotics and many childhood diseases might therefore prove fatal, such as scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, and even measles. He was buried on August 11, 1596. When did Shakespeare die? Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616 and was buried on April 25, 1616 in Holy Trinity Church , Stratford-upon-Avon. What is the inscription on Shakespeare’s grave? GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE, TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE: BLESTE BE Ye [the] MAN Yt [that] SPARES THES STONES, AND CURST BE HE Yt [that] MOVES MY BONES.

Does Shakespeare have descendants? William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway had three children. The eldest, Susanna, was baptized on May 26, 1583, and married John Hall in 1607. They had one child, Elizabeth, in 1608. Elizabeth was married twice, to Thomas Nash in 1626, and to John Bernard in 1649. However, she had no children by either husband. William and Anne also had twins, Judith and Hamnet, who were baptized on February 2, 1585. Hamnet died at age 11 and a half. Judith married Thomas Quiney in 1616, and the couple had three sons: Shakespeare Quiney, who died in infancy, and Richard and Thomas, who both died in 1639 within a month of each other. Since neither of the boys married, there is no possibility of any legitimate descendants from Shakespeare's line. It is possible, however, to claim a relationship to Shakespeare through his sister, Joan. She married William Hart some time before 1600 and there are many descendants of this marriage alive today, in both the male and female lines.

Did Shakespeare have a coat of arms? Yes, William's father, John Shakespeare, was granted a coat of arms in 1596. It was disputed in 1602 by York Herald, Ralph Brooke, saying that the arms were too similar to existing coats of arms, and that the family was unworthy. However, the challenge seems to have been unsuccessful, as the Shakespeare crest appears in later collections of coats of arms and on William Shakespeare's funeral monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare's works Did Shakespeare write the plays and poems attributed to him? Some have argued that a more noble writer was secretly behind the works attributed to Shakespeare; they doubt that someone without an aristocratic pedigree could have written the plays and poetry published under his name. Since the 19th century, several candidates for "hidden author" have been proposed, among them Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Bacon, and Edward de Vere (earl of Oxford). Such debates testify to the lasting importance of Shakespeare's works and call attention to the astonishing achievement that they represent.

In the century since these claims were first advanced, no decisive evidence has been unearthed proving that the plays were produced by anyone but the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, a man equipped with a very good "grammar-school" education and the experience gained working in a professional theater company in London. The Folger has been a major location for research into the authorship question, and welcomes scholars looking for new evidence that sheds light on the plays' origins. How this particular man—or anyone, for that matter—could have produced such an astounding body of work is one of the great mysteries. How many words did Shakespeare write? According to Marvin Spevack's concordances , Shakespeare’s complete works consist of 884,647 words and 118,406 lines. How many plays did Shakespeare write? Thirty-eight is the generally accepted number, though recent claims have been made for King Edward III and some scholars would include part of Sir Thomas More. Another play, Cardenio, has not survived. What is Shakespeare’s earliest play?

His earliest play is probably one of the three parts of King Henry VI ( Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 ), written between 1589–1591. What is Shakespeare’s last play? His last play is probably The Two Noble Kinsmen , which Shakespeare co-wrote with John Fletcher around 1613. What is Shakespeare’s longest play? Hamlet , with 4,042 lines. The Comedy of Errors , with 1,787 lines. What is the "First Folio"? The First Folio is the first comprehensive collection of Shakespeare's plays, containing 36 of the 38 plays we now consider to be his. It was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, by some of the actors from his company. It was the first time a number of Shakespeare's plays, including Macbeth and As You Like It , were published at all. Without the First Folio we might have only about half of the plays that Shakespeare ever wrote. How were Shakespeare's plays published before the First Folio? Many of the plays were published during Shakespeare's lifetime as individual plays in a quarto format .

What are folios and quartos? "Folio" and "quarto" refer to the number of times a sheet of paper has been folded for printing, and thus gives a rough indication of the size of the book. A folio is a book for which the initial sheet of paper has been folded in half, providing two leaves and four pages (the front and back of each leaf) for printing. A quarto is folded again, giving four leaves and eight pages. How many First Folios still exist? The easiest answer to this question is 235. Anthony West counts 232 in his 2001 census of First Folios . In 2014, a previously uncounted copy was discovered in France, and in 2016 two more came to light in Britain. But the full answer is more complicated: there are additional copies whose whereabouts aren’t currently known, and differentiating between a complete copy and a fragment of a First Folio can be tricky. Who has the most First Folios? The Folger Shakespeare Library has 82 First Folios, the most in one collection. Meisei University in Tokyo has the second largest collection, with 12.

Were there any other editions of the First Folio? Four folio editions of the plays were published during the 17th century: First Folio – 1623 Fourth Folio – 1685 Can you give me the source of this quotation from Shakespeare? Here are the sources for some frequently requested quotations. Line numbers may differ, depending on which edition you are consulting. If your quotation is not listed, search for it using Folger Digital Texts . "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players." From Jaques’s speech in As You Like It ( Act 2, scene 7, lines 145-46 ). "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." From Dick the butcher's speech in Henry VI, Part 2 ( Act 4, scene 2, line 75 ). "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" From Juliet’s speech in Romeo and Juliet ( Act 3, scene 2, lines 23-24 ). "Good night, good night!

Parting is such sweet sorrow" From Juliet’s speech in Romeo and Juliet ( Act 2, scene 2, lines 199-200 ). "Oh what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive." This is NOT Shakespeare but Sir Walter Scott, in his long poem Marmion (1808), canto 6, stanza 17. Shakespeare's theater What were the different ticket costs to go to a play in Shakespeare’s time? Prices of admission depended on the kind of theater. Outdoor theaters like the Globe charged one penny to get in and another penny if you wanted to sit in the balconies. By the early seventeenth century, the price of admission went up to about sixpence. Admission to the private indoor theaters, which catered to a more affluent audience, generally began at a basic sixpence to gain entry to the galleries. Fancy gallants who wanted to be seen, however, could sit on the stage for two shillings (24 pence), and a box could be had for half-a-crown (30 pence).

It’s a bit trickier to work out what those costs mean in today’s money: was a penny to get in cheap or expensive? Maybe the easiest way to think about this question is that it cost about 4 pence to provide food and drink for a grown man for one day. How did men cover up their beards if they played women’s roles in Shakespeare’s theater? Usually boys and young men played women's parts on stage, so there was no problem about beards. In fact, Hamlet jokes with one of the actors who visit the court in Denmark: "Why, thy face is valanced since I saw thee last" (Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, lines 447–48 ), meaning that the boy has reached puberty and started to grow a beard. Since his voice would change about the same time (Hamlet says, "Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring." [ Act 2, scene 2, lines 451–53 ]), that would signal the end of female roles for him. Older men probably played female roles from time-to-time, including comic figures like Juliet's Nurse.

In that case, they would probably shave off any beard. Colin Burrow, ed. The Complete Sonnets and Poems. The Oxford Shakespeare, 2002. Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Arden Shakespeare, 2010. Shakespeare's Influence Douglas Lanier. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford, 2002. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare in America. Oxford, 2012. Ania Loomba. Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism. Oxford, 2002. Kim C. Sturgess. Shakespeare and the American Nation. Cambridge, 2007. Gary Taylor. Reinventing Shakespeare: a Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. Vintage, 1991. Shakespeare and the theater Andrew Gurr. The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642, 4th ed. Cambridge, 2009. Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa. Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres. Oxford, 2000. Tiffany Stern.

Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge, 2009. Shakespeare Filmography Kenneth Rothwell. A History of Shakespeare on Screen: a Century of Film and Television, 2nd ed. Cambridge, 2009. British Film Institute. Shakespeare, 16+ Source Guide (essay and bibliography). shakespeare-plays-length - www shakespeare-plays-length The Plays of William Shakespeare placed in line length from shortest to longest. Use our Fact Sheet for the length of Shakespeare's plays in number of lines. Find out the shortest play and the longest play. Shakespeare's Plays in line length order from shortest to longest The Comedy of Errors 1786 lines A Midsummer Night's Dream 2165 lines The Two Gentlemen of Verona 2233 lines shakespeare-plays-line-length - www shakespeare-plays-line-length SHAKESPEARE PLAYS LINE COUNT - FULL LIST OF SHAKESPEARE PLAYS AND THEIR EXACT LINE LENGTH William Shakespeare's plays listed in order of length from the shortest to the longest line count. Your at-a-glance guide to the relativer and absolute length of Shakespeare's plays.

SHAKESPEARE PLAYS IN LINE LENGTH ORDER Shakespeare's Plays in line length order from shortest to longest We have based our line counts on The Complete Works of William Shakespeare edited by W.J.

Craig The Comedy of Errors 1787 lines The Tempest 2086 lines A Midsummer Night's Dream 2186 lines The Two Gentlemen of Verona 2303 lines Timon of Athens 2390 lines Pericles 2454 lines The Taming of the Shrew 2656 lines The Merchant of Venice 2669 lines Henry VI Part 1 2677 lines Twelfth Night 2711 lines Love's Labour's Lost 2800 lines Henry VI Part 3 2809 lines Henry VIII 2820 lines Measure for Measure 2838 lines Much Ado About Nothing 2871 lines As You Like It 2884 lines All's Well That Ends Well 2985 lines The Merry Wives of Windsor 3044 lines Romeo and Juliet 3058 lines Antony and Cleopatra 3068 lines The Winter's Tale 3089 lines Henry VI Part II 3165 lines Henry IV Part 1 3191 lines The Two Noble Kinsmen 3220 lines Othello

 3323 lines 38 Facts About Shakespeare’s 38 Plays | Mental Floss 38 Facts About Shakespeare’s 38 Plays Getty Images Like us on Facebook William Shakespeare died 400 years ago this month, on April 23, 1616.

His complete works—at least 38 surviving plays ( including several collaborations ), 154 sonnets, and five narrative poems, totaling a staggering 884,000 words—are a cornerstone of English literature, and have remained (albeit intermittently) popular ever since his death. So to commemorate the quadricentenary of Shakespeare’s death, here are 38 facts, stats, anecdotes and origins about his 38 plays. 1. ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL Everyone knows Macbeth is supposed to be unlucky, but if you’re superstitious, you might be best off avoiding All’s Well That Ends Well, too. According to A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 , during rehearsals for a revival of the play in London in 1741, one of its stars, William Milward, turned up wearing “too light and airy [a] suit of clothes,” caught “a Spotted Fever,” and fell gravely ill.

The premiere was postponed until the following January, but during the opening performance, the female lead, Peg Woffington , fainted, and her part had to be read by another actress. They postponed the next performance so that Woffington could recover, but Milward fell sick again, causing more postponements. Milward died several days later after completing only one performance. The entire debacle was enough to put producers off staging Shakespeare’s tragi-comic romance for another decade . 2. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA In 1759, David Garrick staged a performance of Antony and Cleopatra in London starring himself and 30-year-old actress Mary Ann Yates in the title roles. Although the production failed to impress the critics (and closed after just six performances) it nevertheless made theatrical history: It marked the first time in the play’s 150-year history that Cleopatra had been played by a woman. Before then, performances had only ever been staged by all-male acting companies—including Shakespeare’s own King’s Men, who staged the first performance in London in 1606. 3.

AS YOU LIKE IT Any actress tackling the smart-talking Rosalind in As You Like It is faced with learning 685 lines , making it Shakespeare’s longest female role and a bigger part than the likes of Prospero (656 lines), Romeo (617 lines), and Falstaff in Henry IV: Part 1 (602 lines). Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s roles are still weighted towards the men: Antony (839 lines) is a much larger role than Cleopatra (678 lines); Macbeth (715) has almost three times more lines than his wife (259); and Hamlet, the longest role of all, is more than twice as long as Rosalind (1506 lines). 4. THE COMEDY OF ERRORS On December 28, 1594, Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were booked to give a seasonal performance before an audience of lawyers at London’s Gray’s Inn , celebrating what was essentially their Christmas party.

The play they performed was The Comedy of Errors (which Shakespeare likely wrote especially for that night ), but things didn’t go quite to plan—The Lord Chamberlain’s Men arrived late, by which time their audience was drunk and the stage had all but been dismantled. They still gave the best performance they could, but the night nevertheless went down in history as “ The Night of Errors .” So what happened? Well, a recent discovery at the British National Archives suggests that something came up at the very last minute—and by “something,” we’re talking about a personally requested performance in front of Queen Elizabeth I. According to the queen’s treasury records, Shakespeare’s company received payment for a royal command performance on the same night that they were booked to play Gray’s Inn. Shakespeare had presumably already committed to the Gray’s Inn performance when word came from the palace that the queen herself wanted some post-Christmas entertainment, but by then it was too late to cancel. So he and his men turned up at Greenwich, performed for the queen, then raced across London to their second booking only for the night to end in chaos. 5.

CORIOLANUS Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain There are no records of Coriolanus being staged during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but the theatrical history books are full of later memorable performances . In 1682, the English Poet Laureate Nahum Tate rewrote the final act himself—a popular trend among later 17th century dramatists—and ended the play with an even more shocking bloodbath than it already has. In 1719, the dramatist John Dennis went one better and rewrote the entire play, calling it The Invader of His Country and using it as an attack on the Jacobite Rising of 1715; it was booed off the stage after three performances. More recently, a production starring Laurence Olivier in 1959 famously ended with a shocking stunt inspired by what happened to Mussolini after he died; Coriolanus threw himself headfirst off a 12-foot platform on stage and remained dangling upside down by his ankles for the remainder of the act—Olivier was 52 years old at the time.

And in 1984, Sir Peter Hall staged a production starring Ian McKellen at London’s National Theatre that began by inviting members of the audience onto the stage to mingle with and react with the actors throughout the play. Despite glowing reviews, Hall’s innovative idea didn’t quite go to plan: During one performance, McKellen later recalled , “as I was about to start the soliloquy in the enemy camp, a woman returning from the bar asked me to sign her programme.” 6. CYMBELINE If you know anyone called Imogen, then they can thank Shakespeare’s Cymbeline for their name. The play features a character called either Innogen or Imogen, who is the daughter of the eponymous king. No one knows which is the correct spelling: In a 1611 diary, astrologer Simon Foreman wrote about seeing the play and mentioned a character named Innogen. But Shakespeare’s First Folio consistently spells the name Imogen. It’s unknown who was right, but modern scholarship tends towards believing the publishers of the First Folio mistook the nn for m and gave us the name Imogen.

That’s not the only name we can thank Shakespeare for, either— he likely invented the name Jessica for The Merchant of Venice. 7. HAMLET At more than 4000 lines and 30,000 words, Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play and its title role is his biggest overall, accounting for 37 percent of the entire script. It’s also believed to be his most produced play, having never fallen out of popularity since it was first performed with Richard Burbage in the title role in 1601. In 2012, Guinness World Records declared Hamlet the second most portrayed human character on film and TV, after Sherlock Holmes (but both fall far short of the non-human Dracula). 8. HENRY IV: PART 1 Shakespeare’s lecherous knight Sir John Falstaff first appeared in Henry IV: Part 1; the character was so popular with audiences that he was featured in Henry IV: Part 2, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

He was named for the real-life Sir John Fastolf , a knight who had fought in the Hundred Years War, but he was originally called “Oldcastle” and named in honor of Sir John Oldcastle, a companion of Henry V who was executed for heresy in 1417. But because Shakespeare changed the character’s name well after the play was written, several inside jokes pop up in Shakespeare’s plays that hint upon this name change: People forget his name in Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V, and a line in Henry IV: Part 1 that refers to Falstaff as “my old lad of the castle” midway through Act 1 . 9. HENRY IV: PART 2 … but an epilogue at the end of Henry IV: Part 2 confusingly states that “Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already ’a been killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man.” Shakespeare it seems is making it very clear Sir John Falstaff is a separate character from Sir John Oldcastle, but why?

Well, it’s thought that Shakespeare added those lines—and, for that matter, changed Falstaff’s name in the first place—to appease Lord Cobham , an important figure in the court of Elizabeth I who was one of Sir John Oldcastle’s descendants, and was understandably unhappy with Shakespeare’s ludicrous portrayal of his ancestor. 10. HENRY V Shakespeare isn’t known for his historical accuracy at the best of times, but his portrayal of the French king Charles VI in Henry V is perhaps one of his most obvious deviations from the truth. In the play, Shakespeare portrays Charles as a decent and astute king who—unlike his overconfident son, the Dauphin—is wise and experienced enough not to downplay Henry’s threat to his kingdom. In reality, Charles was completely insane . He had suffered from episodes of madness—during which he would forget his name, forget he had a family, and even forget that he was king—for more than two decades, and was reportedly so convinced he was made of glass that he had iron rods sown into his clothes to prevent him from shattering to pieces.

His insanity ultimately left a power vacuum in France that threw the country into civil war, weakening the French defenses in the run up to Henry’s invasion and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415—none of which made its way into the play. 11. HENRY VI: PART 1 It’s easy to presume that Shakespeare’s trilogy of Henrys was written in chronological order, beginning with the aftermath of the English losing their French territories (Part 1), followed by the death of the Duke of Gloucester and the rise of the Duke of York (Part 2), and ending with England thrown into a deeply protracted war (Part 3). But one theory claims that Parts 2 and 3 were written first, and were originally intended to form merely a two-part history of Henry VI. In fact, when the two were published individually in 1594 and 1595, no mention was made to there being a third preceding play at all. (Indeed, the 1594 printing of Henry VI: Part 2 gives the play the original title The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of Yorke & Lancaster, with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey.

Part 3 is called The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke and the Good King Henry the Sixt [sic].) If that theory is true, then it’s likely that Henry VI: Part 1 was essentially a Shakespearean prequel, written to cash in on the success of Parts 2 and 3 and to complete his eight-play retelling of the entire Wars of the Roses. 12. HENRY VI: PART 2 Anyone looking to stage their own a production of Henry VI: Part 2 had better bear in mind that it has the largest cast list of any Shakespeare play, with a total of 67 characters (or as many as 70 in other editions ). The Two Gentlemen of Verona, by comparison, has Shakespeare’s shortest list of dramatis personae, with just 17 named characters , plus a dog. (But more on him later …) 13. HENRY VI, PART 3 The last 71 lines of Act 3, scene 2 of Henry VI: Part 3 comprise the longest soliloquy in all of Shakespeare.

Spoken by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the speech sees Richard outline all those in line to the throne before him, and then set his mind to causing chaos and using duplicity to win the crown for himself. His plan eventually works, of course—the next play in Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses cycle is Richard III. 14. HENRY VIII It was during a performance of Henry VIII on June 29, 1613 that the original Globe Theatre burned to the ground . The fire was caused by a cannon, kept just inside the open roof of the theater, that was fired to herald the appearance of important characters onto the stage. On this day, however, as the cannon was fired to announce King Henry’s entrance, it set light to a wooden beam. The flames quickly spread to the Globe’s thatched roof, and within an hour the entire theatre was destroyed. Happily, no one was injured, although according to one eye-witness account , “one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with a bottle of ale.” 15.

JULIUS CAESAR Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain He might be the title character, but Julius Caesar only appears in three scenes in his own play and delivers just 151 lines. By comparison, his conspirators Brutus (722 lines), Cassius (507), and Antony (329) each have much larger roles, and Caesar has nearly three times more lines in Antony and Cleopatra (419) than he does in Julius Caesar, making his the smallest of all Shakespeare’s title roles. 16. KING JOHN In 1899, the English actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree made a silent film version of King John. It’s thought that four scenes were filmed in total, but only one—the king’s tormented death throes as he sits in his throne, comforted by his son—survives. Nevertheless, the 1 minute 16 second film is credited with being the first time Shakespeare was put to film. 17. KING LEAR King Lear might be Shakespeare’s crowning masterpiece, but there’s no escaping the fact that it’s pretty bleak—in finest traditions of Shakespeare’s tragedies, everybody dies in the end.

The king, his daughters, Edmund, Oswald, Gloucester (who is blinded with red-hot knives first, of course), and even the king’s fool all end up dead, while the Duke of Kent, who manages to make it to the final curtain alive, finishes the play by saying that he has “a journey” to go on, as his “master calls” him—and as his master is the now deceased King Lear himself, Kent’s last speech is essentially a suicide note. All in all, King Lear is hardly the most uplifting play, and so for decades audiences weren’t shown Shakespeare’s version of events but rather a more easy-going History of King Lear written by Nahum Tate. Tate’s adaptation of King Lear, first performed in 1681, ends with Lear and Cordelia surviving, Lear being restored to the throne (a clear reference to the recent restoration of Charles II), and Cordelia marrying Edgar (whereas in Shakespeare’s original version, the two never even interact).

Tate’s version and its happy ending prevailed in theaters for the next 150 years, and it wasn’t until 1838 that a version of Shakespeare’s original text was staged with the 19th century actor William Macready in the title role. The production was a thrilling success, and as one critic wrote , “banished that disgrace [Tate’s adaptation] from the stage forever.” 18. LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST Act 5, Scene 2 of Love’s Labour’s Lost is Shakespeare’s longest single scene, running to an impressive 1016 lines; in comparison, the entire script of The Comedy of Errors runs to just 1786 lines, while this one scene alone is just 15 lines shorter than the entire role of Henry V, Shakespeare's third most talkative character. Shakespeare’s shortest scene , incidentally, is in Antony and Cleopatra: Act 3, scene 9 contains just six lines , in which Antony explains how he will arrange his men to see how many ships Caesar is sending into battle, totaling 33 words. 19.

MACBETH Shakespeare is well known for coining a number of words and phrases we use today, but the expression to steal someone’s thunder is probably unique among his contributions to the language. It derives not from one of his scripts, but from a performance of one. In 1709, the actor and playwright John Dennis invented a machine for replicating the sound of thunder on stage, which he put to good use in a performance of a play he had written called Appius and Virginia at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. Dennis’s play (much like his version of Coriolanus mentioned above) flopped, and closed after just a few performances to be replaced by a production of Macbeth staged by a rival theatre troupe. Dennis gamely attended the play’s premiere, but was shocked to hear his thunder-making machine being used during the performance. Enraged, he stood up in the audience and yelled at the stage, “Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!” 20.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE On February 18, 1662 , the English diarist Samuel Pepys saw a production of Measure For Measure in London, writing later that it was “a good play and well performed,” and that he had particularly enjoyed “the little girl’s—whom I had never saw act before—dancing and singing.” The little girl in question was Moll Davis, a 14-year-old actress who took on the role of Viola and entertained the audience by dancing and playing the castanets—and if you don’t think that sounds anything like the Measure For Measure, you know, you’re quite right. The play that Pepys had actually seen was The Law Against Lovers , a Restoration adaption of Measure For Measure by the English poet and playwright Sir William Davenant. Using Measure For Measure as a basis, Davenant erased several of the play’s characters and replaced them with Beatrice and Benedick, the sparring lovers from Much Ado About Nothing, making Benedick Angelo’s brother, and inventing the part of Viola to give Beatrice a younger sister.

This kind of butchering of Shakespeare might seem odd to modern audiences, but wasn't rare in the 17th and 18th centuries—and Davenant was by no means the worst offender. In 1699, the writer Charles Gildon combined Shakespeare’s original text with Davenant’s adaptation to produce Measure For Measure, or Beauty The Best Advocate—which ended with an epilogue delivered by the ghost of Shakespeare himself. 21. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Shakespeare’s plays are notoriously difficult to date, but a seemingly throwaway line in the opening scene of The Merchant of Venice—“ And see my wealthy Andrew dock’d in sand ”—allows us pinpoint its date relatively accurately. The “Andrew” in question is the San Andrés or St. Andrew, a Spanish galleon that was run aground during an English attack on Cadíz in southwest Spain in June 1596, and subsequently commandeered by the English Navy.

News would have reached England by late July , and it would have taken several more weeks—probably not until after the ship was brought back to London in August, at which point she ran aground in a sandbank in the Thames—for such a contemporary reference to work with Elizabethan audiences. Ultimately, it’s likely Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice (and this noticeably contemporary line) sometime in late 1596 or early 1597. The earliest performance we know about, however, wasn’t until February 10, 1605, when the play was staged for King James I, who enjoyed it so much he asked for it to be staged again just two days later. 22. THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert in 1840 ensured that the name of the British royal household subsequently changed from Hanover to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha .

Thankfully this mouthful only remained in place for the 16 years following her death in 1901 through to 1917 , when at the height of the First World War King George V decreed that, in light of Britain’s current relationship with Germany, the royal name should be changed to something closer to home: Windsor. When news of the change reached the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, he is reported to have quipped that he “will go and see The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.” 23. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain Samuel Pepys might have enjoyed Measure for Measure, but he hated A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In his diary on September 29, 1662 , he wrote that it was a play “which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.” And nor was he alone : Tolstoy thought that Shakespeare’s plays were “trivial and positively bad.” Tolkien dismissed reading Shakespeare as “folly.” And Voltaire referred to the handful of scenes and plays that he actually liked out of Shakespeare’s complete works as “a few pearls … found in his enormous dunghill.” But perhaps most critical of all was George Bernard Shaw, who once wrote that, apart from Homer, “there is no eminent writer…whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear [sic].” Othello was “melodramatic,” Twelfth Night was a “potboiler,” and Cymbeline was “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order”—so terrible in fact that Shaw wrote his own ending for it, Cymbeline Refinished , in 1937. 24.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Several of Shakespeare’s comedies have seemingly throwaway titles, but the title of Much Ado About Nothing is actually a lot less flippant that it might seem. In Shakespeare’s time, nothing and noting were pronounced practically identically , while noting (as well as meaning “taking note”) was used to mean eavesdropping or overhearing. And because it’s through misunderstandings and “mis-notings” that much of the action of the play comes about, Much Ado About Nothing could be interpreted as being “much ado” about actually quite a lot. 25. OTHELLO It’s well known that Shakespeare based many of his plays on earlier folktales, plays, histories and legends, and Othello is no different. It’s based on Un Capitano Moro (The Moorish Captain), a tale by the 16th century Italian writer Cinthio , whose Story of Epitia Shakespeare also used as the basis of Measure For Measure. What makes Othello so different, however, is that in Cinthio’s original tale only one character, Disdemona, has a name, while all others are merely known by their rank.

That left Shakespeare to provide his own names for his version of the story, giving scholars an opportunity to see his thinking and discuss the meanings behind his choices. “Iago,” for instance, is a Galician form of Jacob, which means “supplanter,” while Shakespeare probably invented the name “Othello” himself based on Otho, the name of a short-lived Roman emperor whose downfall was remarkably similar to Othello’s . 26. PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE Although some scholars credit Pericles, Prince of Tyre entirely to Shakespeare, others claim he had nothing to do with it. Still, it's widely thought that he wrote the final half of the play himself, while the first 835 lines are credited to the dramatist George Wilkins . Despite the questionable authorship, however, Pericles is known to have been the first Shakespeare play performed in the modern era, revived in 1660 after the reopening of the theatres by a 17th century actor named Thomas Betterton. 27. RICHARD II All 2803 lines in Shakespeare’s Richard II are written in verse, with no prose passages at all.

That makes it the longer of only two verse-only plays in Shakespeare’s complete works—the other being King John. 28. RICHARD III Hamlet might be Shakespeare’s longest role and longest play today, but when the First Folio —essentially Shakespeare’s first “complete works”— was published posthumously in 1623, the longest play was Richard III . That’s partly because, with 3570 lines, Richard III itself is a long play, and partly because the Folio edition of Hamlet omits several significant scenes and speeches and is several hundred lines shorter than modern editions of the text. 29. ROMEO AND JULIET “Come and see, you who are negligent, / Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi: / One lot already grieving, the other in fear. / Come, you who are cruel, come and see the distress / Of your noble families, and cleanse their rottenness.” If you don’t recognize that line from Romeo and Juliet, you’re not wrong—it’s actually a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy , written 250 years before Shakespeare was even born.

It’s thought that Dante’s two “already grieving” Montagues and Capulets were real-life warring dynasties in medieval Italy, whose violent opposition earned them a place in his Purgatory and, from there, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 30. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW The Taming of the Shrew contains the only word Shakespeare used beginning with X: in a speech at the end of Act 1 , Petruchio explains to Hortensio that he would happily marry any woman, even if she was “as curst and shrewd as Socrates’ Xanthippe or a worse,” provided that she was wealthy. Xanthippe was Socrates’ wife, who was was labeled “the hardest to get along with of all the women there are,” by Antisthenes (as quoted by Xenophon), one of Socrates’ students. Ultimately Shakespeare, alongside many others writers since, used her name as a byword for a bad-tempered, henpecking woman. 31. THE TEMPEST On June 2, 1609, a ship named Sea Venture set sail from Portsmouth as part of a fleet of ships heading for Jamestown, Virginia.

After more than seven weeks at sea, on July 24, the fleet sailed directly into an enormous hurricane, and while the other ships headed north to escape, the Sea Venture became separated from the group and faced the full force of the storm alone. Captain Sir George Somers was left with little option: He deliberately steered the ship towards the only land he and his 150 passengers and crew had seen for weeks, and intentionally ran the ship aground on Bermuda. For the next nine months, the survivors of the Sea Venture remained stranded on the island, after which Somers and his remaining men completed the construction of two smaller ships, Deliverance and Patience (pieced together from the wreckage and timber from the island) and set sail once more; they finally reached Jamestown on May 23, 1610. When news of their incredible ordeal and survival reached England weeks later, it caused a sensation—and inspired Shakespeare to begin work on The Tempest. 32. TIMON OF ATHENS Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain With 2512 lines, Timon of Athens is the second shortest of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, and his eighth shortest play overall.

But with 850 lines to himself, Timon is Shakespeare’s fifth largest role (after Hamlet, Iago, Henry V and Othello), and a considerably longer role than the likes of King Lear, Marc Antony, and Richard III. Such a substantial role in such a relatively short play means that any actor playing Timon has to carry a staggering 34 percent of the play himself, second only to Hamlet (at 37 percent) in its theatrical weight. 33. TITUS ANDRONICUS The bloody violence and grim content of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus—which includes a rape, several murders, torture, execution, dismemberment, filicide, and a mother eating a pie made out of her sons’ flesh—often doesn’t sit too well with audiences today (in fact, five people fainted at a 2014 performance at London’s Globe), but in Shakespeare’s day, it’s thought that it was one of, if not the, most successful of his plays.

Three quarto editions of the script were published before the First Folio in 1623 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in contrast, only had two) and in 1614, Ben Jonson lamented the play’s continued popularity in the opening of his play Bartholomew Fair. Jonson also mentioned that the play was by now “five and twenty, or thirty” years old—which has led some Shakespeare scholars to suggest that Titus Andronicus might have been written as early as 1586 . If that’s the case, Titus would be Shakespeare’s earliest play, and probably the only play he wrote before moving to London from Stratford. 34. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA If Titus was Shakespeare’s most popular play, then Troilus and Cressida was his least successful.

Although some early sources of the text state that it had been performed at The Globe, the 1609 publication of the play stated that it was “a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar,” a discrepancy thought to imply that the first performance was a failure, and that the text was drastically amended before publication in 1609. Despite these amendments however, the play remained unpopular: John Dryden famously dismissed it as a “ heap of rubbish ” and rewrote the story himself in 1679, while the play’s inconsistent mix of Greek myth, bawdy comedy, deep tragedy and an unhappy ending alienated audiences so much that it wasn’t performed again until as relatively recently as 1898. 35. TWELFTH NIGHT Twelfth Night, or What You Will was the only one of his plays that Shakespeare gave a subtitle. Quite what he wanted the title to imply is debatable, although some have suggested that he was trying to poke fun at the trend in theatre at the time for attaching snappy subtitles to literary works (specifically probably John Marston, who wrote his own play titled What You Will at the same time).

Shakespeare’s Henry VIII is also sometimes given a subtitle, All Is True, but that wasn’t used in the First Folio and is presumed to have been attached to the play at a later date (or else was its original title, before it was changed in line with Shakespeare’s other royal histories). 36. TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA The Two Gentlemen of Verona is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays to commonly feature a dog, Crab, the pet of the comic servant, Launce. Crab has no lines (obviously) and only features in one scene in the entire play ( Act 3, scene 2 ), but he steals enough of it to be labeled “the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon” by Oxford Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells. He might steal the scene, but Crab isn’t treated very well : “I think Crab, my dog, be the sourest-natured dog that lives,” Launce laments in his famous monologue, complaining that while he said goodbye to his family, “did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear.” Even the family cat, he explains, was “wringing her hands” at his departure. 37.

TWO NOBLE KINSMEN Co-written with John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen is believed to be the last play he worked on, written sometime between early 1613 and autumn 1614. The scene in the play in which a baboon dances a Morris dance , however, is not thought to be one Shakespeare worked on … 38. A WINTER’S TALE Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale was based on an earlier romantic tale, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, by the Elizabethan writer Robert Greene. Shakespeare kept much of Greene’s plot and structure intact (and to do so had to insert a 16-year gap in the story between Acts 3 and 4) but as a result, when Greene’s facts were wrong, that meant Shakespeare’s facts were wrong: Act 3, scene 3 opens in “Bohemia, a desert country near the sea,” despite the fact that Bohemia, roughly equivalent to modern-day Czech Republic, was landlocked. Shakespeare’s error ultimately led to the phrase “the seacoast of Bohemia” entering the language as another name for any fictitious Utopia.

And although some Shakespeare apologists have attempted to explain away this inaccuracy, one inescapable fact remains: Bohemia has no desert either.

Question: Which was Shakespeare's shortest play?
Answer: The Comedy of Errors